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From: sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel
Subject: Re: Comments on proposed Eiffel language changes
Message-ID: <3476@tukki.jyu.fi>
Date: 21 Feb 90 07:21:50 GMT
References: <48a55876.12c9a@digital.sps.mot.com> <2888@goanna.oz.au>
Reply-To: sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 45

In article <2888@goanna.oz.au> ok@goanna.oz.au (Richard O'keefe) writes:
>In article <48a55876.12c9a@digital.sps.mot.com>, shelley@atc.sps.mot.com (Norman K. Shelley) writes:
>> ...
>> underscore ('_')
>> as a word separator is NOT English either.  A whitespace is the accepted
>> standard but computers have troubles with whitespace in names/labels
>> so what do we do?
>
>This is contrary to fact.  Computers have no trouble whatsoever with
>layout inside names.  Consider Fortran, Algol 68, and IMP for starters.

Fortran's stupid lexical conventions certainly cause trouble both to
computers (compilers: separate lexical analysis is impossible)
and more importantly, to programmers. Everybody knows some classic
example like
      DO 100 I = 1.10

>The only thing that tokenisers have trouble with is telling where one
>identifier ends and another begins.  There are several ways around this.
> ....
>Another is to use a form of stropping; there were four official
>methods of stropping for Algol 68 and IMP used another, e.g.
>	%require latest x = %old y;

Please give a more enlightening example. In the above, the '%'
characters appear only at places where they contribute nothing
to separating the identifiers. Also, what is/was IMP?

Some old Algol-60 compiler(s) required the language keywords
to be within apostrophes:
   'begin' 'integer' n, m ... 'end'
Is that called 'stropping' also? It wasn't such a bad idea:
now when language standards are updated and new features added,
there is often a problem of new keywords clashing with identifiers
in existing software.

> ...

Markku Sakkinen
Department of Computer Science
University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts)
Seminaarinkatu 15
SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again)
Finland
          SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative network address)